Electrical connectors are used in myriad applications for joining wires and electrical components to one another. Typically, an electrical connector includes a housing and a plurality of electrical contact pins that extend through the housing. In some configurations, the electrical contact pin includes a contact end and a wire input end. The wire input end is typically shaped like a cup and when the electrical connector is joined to a wire, the wire is placed in the cup and molten solder is utilized to join the two together. Hence, the wire input end is referred to in the art as a “solder cup”.
In order to prevent oxidation and wear of the contact pins and the solder cups, an oxidation-resistant material, such as gold, may be plated on to both. However, when the molten solder is applied to the solder cups during a soldering process, the plated gold melts and dissolves into the solder. The gold contaminates the solder, thereby compromising the strength of the soldered joint between the wire and the contact pin. Therefore, as part of the wire joining process, the gold plating is desirably removed from the solder cup.
Conventionally, the gold plating has been removed by first pre-tinning the solder cup and then manually extracting the excess solder from each individual solder cup. Typically, a technician first applies molten solder to each of the solder cups. Next, the technician uses a soldering iron to apply heat to one of the soldered solder cups to melt the solder within the solder cup. The melted solder causes the gold plating to melt and dissolve into the solder. A solder wick is then used to draw the molten solder and gold out of the cup.
Although the conventional method is effective, it may be time-consuming, and thus potentially costly. For example, manual extraction of the gold plating from one solder cup may take up to a minute. If an electrical connector has over one hundred electrical contacts, a technician may spend over an hour and a half on the extraction step alone.
Hence, there is a need for a method of soldering a wire to a wire connector that addresses one or more of the above-noted drawbacks. Namely, a soldering method is needed that is more time-efficient and simple to implement, and thus less costly than present methods. The present invention addresses one or more of these needs.